Doomsday Clock Is Actually Stupid
Last week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the Doomsday Clock would continue to be set at 100 seconds to midnight, as humanity was closest to total annihilation since the clock was created. We haven’t moved the hand since 2020, when it dropped to its current dismal level with less than two minutes left.
How the Doomsday Clock works
The Doomsday Clock is a symbol illustrating the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe. It was invented in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Originally set at seven minutes to midnight, the clock has been advanced 24 times by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Safety Council since its inception.
It peaked in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when it was set to a reassuring 17 minutes to midnight. Since then, the clock has steadily moved closer to disaster, to its current “we’re all going to die” rating.
But don’t worry too much about the doomsday clock. The measurement of clocks has always been arbitrary, and their purpose political. What it actually “measures” has become so pervasive over the past few decades that it’s hard to see the value of reading it at all.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t worry about the many potential doomsdays the clock illustrates. I am saying that the doomsday clock by itself is not a good way to understand the likelihood or time frame of an approaching global catastrophe. It’s like a Soviet propaganda poster: a relic of the Cold War, interesting mostly as a curiosity.
The Doomsday Clock is a Metaphor, Not a Measurement
When it started in the early days of the Cold War, the Doomsday Clock existed primarily to track and comment on political tensions between the US and the USSR, the two largest nuclear powers on Earth. According to Eugene Rabinovich , the first editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it was designed to “scare people out of their rationality”. Since then, the “clock” has expanded to include climate change and a host of other dangers such as pandemics, cyberattacks and disinformation.
A nuclear war between Russia and the United States would most likely result in the complete annihilation of life on Earth in a matter of hours, a concept that was new to humans in 1947. of the two empires affected the probability of death of all. But the Cold War ended for decades, and the dangers we face now are very different from those we faced in 1964. Climate change is a looming disaster, but it won’t die down like nuclear war, and the many other threats listed by the watch won’t (on their own) kill humanity in the way we might predict, so it’s fair to ask what the watch should measured in 2022. The answer is not entirely clear.
“It’s not scientific,” Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and chairman of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, explained to The New Republic , “it’s a number that comes from a group of people who study each of the questions, and then have a huge amount of discussion and, ultimately, convergence of the number . And this figure is frankly conditional. It’s not a scientific value.”
Even the first “setting” of the Doomsday Clock was arbitrary. Artist Martil Langsdorf created the cover image for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She opted for a minimalist clock face and chose the time from seven to midnight herself because “on the page, it seemed like the right time … it suited my eye.”
The Doomsday Clock is not the best metaphor, even at the most basic level. The defining characteristic of a watch is that the hand inevitably moves forward to provide useful, objectively accurate information. The arrow of the Doomsday Clock moves in both directions, and this is nothing more than an illustration of the subjective opinion of a small group of people.
Wake people up with a doomsday alarm?
The purpose of the watch has always been to awaken people to the danger we face. As Krause puts it: “Scientists have a responsibility – that’s why I’m involved – to try to warn the public about the realities of the world, and if you use emotional tools to do that, you should… I’m writing something popular, I don’t really expect that it really teaches you something. What I expect is to motivate people to want to learn. And, in my opinion, that’s what watches do.”
But does the Doomsday Clock really motivate people to want to learn? For me it’s the other way around. If I accept the idea that humanity is far from its end, and these scientists have “proved” it, I want to take a nap, not hear more about it. Or, as National Geographic put it, “If everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis.”
History is full of unforeseen consequences, so who can say whether the political assessments of the scientists who changed the course of events were even correct? Geopolitical events that were seen as moving hands in a positive direction could actually bring us closer to death, and we cannot know what would have happened if the opposite decisions had been made. A softer stance by one of the superpowers in the 1960s would probably have taken the clock away from midnight, but it might have encouraged the Soviets or the US to think they could win a nuclear war. There’s just no way to know.
Consider a statement released this year without a hand movement. When it comes to nuclear war specifically, atomic scientists agreed that we have made some progress over the past couple of years: the New START arms control treaty between the US and Russia is being extended, and the US is committing to accede to the Paris climate agreement and restore the nuclear deal with Iran is seen as positive, while continued efforts by China and North Korea to develop nuclear arsenals push the clock closer to midnight. I can buy it, but as you read on, you get a dizzying list of “bad things that are happening” supposedly offsetting progress in nuclear arms control and pushing your hands towards midnight. Here is just a small sample:
- Terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as some criminal organizations, continue to declare their determination to create, acquire and use biological weapons to achieve their goals.
- The misinformation also discourages the wearing of masks and social distancing.
- Cyber attackers have become more daring.
- Chinese use of surveillance technology has reached new heights.
- In November, Russia tested an anti-satellite missile, destroying one of its own satellites and creating a cloud of debris that orbited perilously close to the International Space Station.
For the clock to have useful meaning, it is necessary to compare the threat of potential ISIS biological attacks with the extension of the nuclear treaties between the United States and Russia and determine whether this is moving up or down, which is an absurd statement. , given the chaotic nature of such a complex system as “every possible geopolitical force on earth that can harm humanity.”
A new symbol of the new time?
I think the best symbol of our current situation could be a ring of hundreds of alarm clocks that explode when their alarm goes off. All alarms are set to different times and we don’t know when any of them should go off. We are free to move the hands wherever we want, but only if we can convince/force enough people to agree to change the time. If nothing is done, everyone will explode. If we do something, we can avoid explosions if we do not make mistakes and we are very lucky.
But that’s just me. If you have another suggestion to replace the Doomsday Clock, leave it in the comments.